HOW FEW REMAIN

by Harry Turtledove

Chapter One: 1881

Buffalo bones littered the prairie south of Fort Dodge, Kansas. Colonel George Custer
gave them only the briefest glance. They seemed as natural a part of the landscape as had
the buffalo themselves a decade before. Custer had killed his share of buffalo and more.
Now he was after more dangerous game.

He raised the Springfield carbine to his shoulder and fired at one of the Kiowas
fleeing before him. The Indian, one of the rearmost of Satanta's raiding party, did not
fall.

Custer loaded another cartridge into the carbine's breech and fired again. Again, the
shot was useless. The Kiowa turned on his pony for a Parthian shot. Fire and smoke belched
from the muzzle of his rifle. The bullet kicked up a puff of dust ten or fifteen yards in
front of Custer.

He fired again, and so did the Kiowa. The Indian's Tredegar Works carbine, a close copy
of the British Martini-Henry, had about the same performance as his own weapon. Both men
missed once more. The Kiowa gave all his attention back to riding, bending low over his
pony's neck and coaxing from the animal every bit of speed it had.

"They're gaining on us, the blackhearted savages!" Custer shouted to his
troopers, inhibited in language by the pledge his wife, Libbie, had finally succeeded in
extracting from him.

"Let me and a couple of the other boys with the fastest horses get out ahead of
the troop and make 'em fight us till the rest of you can catch up," his brother
suggested.

"No, Tom. Wouldn't work, I'm afraid. They wouldn't fight--they'd just scatter like
a covey of quail."

"Damned cowards," Major Tom Custer growled. He was a younger, less flamboyant
version of his brother, but no less ferocious in the field. "They bushwhack our
farmers, then they run. If they want to come up into Kansas, let 'em fight like men once
they're here."

"They don't much want to fight," Custer said. "All they want to do is
kill and burn and loot. That's easier, safer, and more profitable, too."

"Give me the Sioux any day, up in Minnesota and Dakota and Wyoming," Tom
Custer said. "They fought hard, and only a few of them ran away into Canada once we'd
licked them."

"And the Canadians disarmed the ones who did," Custer added. "I'll
be--dashed if I like the Canadians, mind you, but they play the game the way it's supposed
to be played."

"It's cricket," Tom said, and Custer nodded. His younger brother pointed
south. "We aren't going to catch them on our side of the line, Autie."

"I can see that." George Custer scowled--at fate, not at the family nickname.
After a moment, the scowl became a fierce grin. "All right, by jingo, maybe we won't
catch them on our side of the line. We'll just have to catch them on theirs."

Tom looked startled. "Are you sure?"

"You'd best believe I'm sure." The excitement of the pursuit ran through
Custer in a hot tide. Whatever consequences came from extending the pursuit, he'd worry
about them later. Now all he wanted to do was teach the Kiowas a lesson even that sneaky
old devil Satanta wouldn't forget any time soon. He shouted over to the regimental bugler:
"Blow Pursuit."

"Sir?" the bugler said, as surprised as Tom Custer had been. Then he grinned.
"Yes, sir!" He raised the bugle to his lips. The bold and martial notes rang out
across the plain. The men of the Fifth Cavalry Regiment needed a moment to grasp what that
call implied. Then they howled like wolves. Some of them waved their broad-brimmed black
felt hats in the air.

From long experience, the Kiowas understood U.S. horn calls as well as any cavalry
trooper. Their heads went up, as if they were game fear-ing it would be flushed from
cover. That's what they are, all right, Custer thought.

As often happened, Tom's thoughts ran in the same track as his own. "They won't
duck back into their lair this time," his younger brother said. Now that the decision
was made, Tom was all for it.

They pounded past a farmhouse the Kiowas had burned in a raid a couple of years
earlier. Custer recognized those ruins; they meant he was less than a mile from the border
with the Indian Territory. Up ahead, the Kiowas squeezed still more from their ponies.
Custer smiled savagely. That might get them over the line, but even those tough animals
would start wearing down soon. "And then," he told the wind blowing tears from
his eyes, "then they're mine, sure as McClellan belonged to Lee twenty years
ago."

He fired again at the Kiowas, and shouted in exultation as one of them slid from his
horse's back and thudded to the ground, where, after rolling a couple of times, he lay
still. "Good shot," his brother said. "Hell of a good shot."

"We've got 'em now," Custer said. The first Kiowas had to be over the line.
He didn't care. "We won't let 'em get away. Every last redskin in that band is
ours." How his men cheered!

And then all of Custer's ferocious joy turned to ashes. Tom pointed off to the east,
from which direction a squadron of cavalry was approaching at a fast trot. All the Kiowas
were over the line by then. They reined in, whooping in their incomprehensible language.
They knew they were safe.

Custer knew it, too. Chasing the Kiowas into Indian Territory, punishing them, and then
riding back into Kansas with no one but the Indians the wiser, was one thing. Doing it
under the watchful eyes of that other cavalry squadron was something else again. Hating
those horsemen, hating himself, Custer held his hand high to halt his men. They stopped on
the Kansas side of the line.

The approaching cavalrymen wore hats and blouses of a cut not much different from those
of Custer's troopers. Theirs, though, were gray, not the various shades of blue the U.S.
cavalry used. And a couple of their officers, Custer saw, were in the new dirt-brown
uniforms the Confederate States had adopted from the British. The limeys called that color
khaki; to the Rebs, it was butternut.

One of those Confederate officers rode toward Custer, waving as he moved forward.
Custer waved back: come ahead. The Rebel captain proved to be a fresh-faced fellow in his
twenties; he would have been wearing short pants during the War of Secession. Seeing him
made Custer feel every one of his forty-one years.

"Good mornin' to you, Colonel," the captain drawled, nodding in a way that
looked friendly enough. "You weren't planning on riding over the international border
by any chance, were you?"

"If I was, you'll never prove it, Captain--" Custer tried for cool
detachment. What came out was a frustrated snarl.

By the way the Confederate cavalryman smiled, he heard that frustration--heard it and
relished it. He bowed in the saddle. The Rebs were always polite as cats ... and always
ready to claw, too. "I'm Jethro Weathers, Colonel," he said. "And you're
right--I'll never prove it. But you and the United States would have been embarrassed if
I'd come along half an hour later and found your men inside the territory of the
Confederate States."

He sounded disappointed he and his troopers hadn't caught Custer in flagrante delicto.
Custer's frustration boiled into fury: "If your government would keep those murdering
redskinned savages on your side of the border, we wouldn't want to go over
yonder"--he waved south, into Indian Territory--"and give 'em what they
deserve."

"Why, Colonel," Captain Weathers said, amusement in his voice, "I have
no proof at all those Kiowas ever entered the territory of the United States. As far as I
can see, you were leading an unprovoked punitive expedition into a foreign country.
Richmond would see things the same way, I'm sure. So would London. So would Paris."

That didn't faze Weathers a bit: "For all I know, you've already been into the
Confederate States, murdered the poor fellow, and then hauled him back into the USA to
justify raiding Confederate soil."

A flush spread up Custer's face; his ears went hot at the sheer effrontery of that.
"You--dashed Rebs will pay one day for giving the redskins guns and letting them come
up and raid white men's farms whenever it strikes their fancy."

"This is our territory, Colonel," Captain Weathers said, amused no more.
"We shall defend it against the incursion of a foreign power--by which I mean the
United States. And you have no call--none, sir, none whatever--to get up on your high
horse and tell me what my country ought and ought not to be doing, especially since the
United States harbor swarms of Comanches in New Mexico and turn them loose against west
Texas whenever it strikes your fancy."

"We didn't start that until those outrages in Kansas grew too oppressive to
ignore," Custer answered. "Why, on this very raid--this raid you have the gall
to deny--the savages made two white women minister to their animal lusts, then cut their
throats and worked other dreadful indignities upon their bare and abused bodies."

"You think the Comanches don't do that in Texas?" Captain Weathers returned.
"And the way I heard it, Colonel, they started doing it there first."

Custer scowled. "We killed off the buffalo to deny the Kiowas a livelihood, and
you gave them cattle to take up the slack."

"The Comanches are herding cattle these days, too." Weathers made as if to go
back to his troopers, who waited inside Confederate territory. "I see no point to
continuing this discussion. Good day, sir."

"Wait," Custer said, and the Confederate captain, polite still, waited.
Breathing heavily, Custer went on, "When our two nations separated, I had a great
deal of sympathy and friendship for many of the men who found high rank in the Army of the
Confederate States. I hoped and believed that, even though we were two, we could share
this continent in peace."

"And so we have," Jethro Weathers said. "There is no war between my
country and yours, Colonel."

"Not now," Custer agreed. "Not yet. But you will force one upon us if
you continue with this arrogant policy of yours here in the West. The irritations will
grow too great, and then--"

"Don't speak to me of arrogance," Weathers broke in. "Don't speak to me
of irritation, not when you Yankees have finally gone and put another one of those
God-damned Black Republicans in the White House."

"Blaine's only been in office a month, but he's already shown he's not nearly so
bad as Lincoln was," Custer answered, "and he's not your business anyhow, any
more than Longstreet's ours."

"Blaine talks big," the Confederate captain answered. "People who talk
big get to thinking they can act big. You talked about war, Colonel. If your James G.
Blaine thinks you Yankees can lick us now when you couldn't do it twenty years ago, he'd
better think twice. And if you think you can ride over the line into Indian Territory
whenever it strikes your fancy, you'd better think twice, too, Colonel."

When Weathers moved to ride back to his squadron this time, Custer said not a word. He
stared after the Indians whom Weathers' timely arrival had saved. His right hand folded
into a fist inside its leather gauntlet. He pounded it down on his thigh, hard, once,
twice, three times. His lips shaped a silent word. It might have been dash. It might not.

As the train rattled west through the darkness over the Colorado prairie, the porter
came down the aisle of the Pullman car. "Make you bed up, sir?" he asked in
English with some foreign accent: Russian, maybe, or Yiddish.

Abraham Lincoln looked up from the speech he'd been writing. Slowly, deliberately, he
capped his pen and put it in his pocket. "Yes, thank you," he said. He rose
slowly and deliberately, too, but his lumbago gave a twinge even so. As best he could, he
ignored the pain. It came with being an old man.

Moving with swift efficiency, the porter let down the hinged seat back, laid a mattress
on the bed thus created, and made it up in the blink of an eye. "Here you are,
sir," he said, drawing the curtain around the berth to give Lincoln the chance to
change into his nightshirt in something close to privacy.

"I thank you," Lincoln said, and tipped him a dime. The porter pocketed it
with a polite word of thanks and went on to prepare the next berth. Looking down at the
bed, Lincoln let out a rueful chuckle. The Pullman attendant had been too efficient.
Lincoln bent down and undid the sheet and blanket at the foot of the mattress. Pullman
berths weren't made for men of his inches. He put on his nightclothes, got into bed, and
turned off the gas lamp by which he had been writing.

The rattling, jouncing ride and the thin, lumpy mattress bothered him only a little. He
was used to them, and he remembered worse. When he'd gone from Illinois to Washington
after being elected president, Pullmans hadn't been invented. He'd traveled the whole way
sitting upright in a hard seat. And when, four years later, the voters had turned him out
of office for failing to hold the Union together, he'd gone back to Illinois the same way.

Ridden out of town on the rails, he thought, and laughed a little. He twisted, trying
to find a position somewhere close to comfortable. If a spring didn't dig into the small
of his back, another one poked him in the shoulder. That was how life worked: if you
gained somewhere, you lost some- where else.

He twisted again. There--that was better. He'd had a lot of experience on the
railroads, these sixteen years since failing of reelection. "Once you get the taste
for politics," he murmured in the darkness, "everything else is tame."

He'd thought he would quietly return to the law career he'd left to go to the White
House. And so he had, for a little while. But the appetite for struggle at the highest
level he'd got in Washington had stayed with him. Afterwards, legal briefs and pleadings
weren't enough to satisfy.

He yawned, then grimaced. The way the Democrats had fawned on the Southern Confederacy
grated on him, too. And so he'd started speechifying, all across the country, doing what
he could to make people see that, even if the war was lost, the struggle continued.
"I always was good on the stump," he muttered. "I even did some good, I
daresay."

Some good. The United States had eventually emancipated the thousands of slaves still
living within their borders. The Confederate States held their millions in bondage to this
day. And a lot of Republicans, nowadays, sounded more and more like Democrats in their
efforts to put the party's sorry past behind them and get themselves elected. A lot of
Republicans, these days, didn't want the albatross of Lincoln around their necks.

He yawned again, twisted one more time, and fell asleep, only to be rudely awakened
half an hour later when the train hissed and screeched to a stop at some tiny prairie
town. He was used to that, too, even if he couldn't do anything about it. Before long, he
was asleep once more.

He woke again, some time in the middle of the night. This time, he swung down out of
his berth. Once a man got past his Biblical threescore-and-ten, his flesh reminded him of
its imperfections more often than it had in his younger days.

Sliding the curtain aside, he walked down the aisle of the sleeper car, past the snores
and grunts coming from behind other curtains, to the washroom at the far end of the car.
He used the necessary, then pumped the handle of the tin sink to get himself a glass of
water. He drank it down, wiped his chin on the sleeve of his nightshirt, and set the glass
by the sink for the next man who would want it.

Up the aisle he came. Someone was getting down from an upper berth, and almost stepped
on his toes. "Careful, friend," Lincoln said quietly. The man's face went
through two separate stages of surprise: first that he hadn't seen anyone nearby, and then
at whose feet he'd almost abused.

"Damned old Black Republican fool," he said, also in a near-whisper: he was
polite to his fellow passengers, if not to the former president. Without giving Lincoln a
chance to reply, he stalked down the aisle.

Lincoln shrugged and finished the short journey back to his own berth. That sort of
thing happened to him at least once on every train he took. Had he let it bother him, he
would have had to give up politics and become as much a hermit as Robinson Crusoe.

He got back into bed. The upper berth above his was empty. He sighed as he struggled
for comfort again. Mary had been difficult all the years of their marriage, and especially
in the years since he'd left the White House, but he missed her all the same. He'd got
over the typhoid they'd caught in St. Louis four or five years before. She hadn't.

The next thing he knew, daylight was stealing through the curtains. His back ached a
little, but he'd had a pretty good night--better than most he spent rolling from one town
to the next, that was certain.

He got dressed, used the necessary again, and was back in his berth when the day porter
came by. "And the top o' the mornin' to you, sir," he said. Lincoln had no
trouble placing his accent. "Will you be wanting a proper seat the now, 'stead o'
your bedding and all?"

"That I will." A natural mimic, Lincoln needed an effort of will not to copy
the porter's brogue. After he tipped the fellow, he asked, "How much longer until we
get into Denver?"

"Nobbut another two, three hours," the porter answered. Lincoln sighed; he
was supposed to have arrived at sunrise, not mid-morning. Well, no doubt the people
waiting for him knew of the distant relationship between scheduled and actual arrival
times.

"Time enough for breakfast, then," he said.

"Indeed and there is, sir, and to spare," the porter agreed.

Lincoln went back to the dining car. He did appreciate the bellows arrangements the
railroads were using between carriages these days. Going from car to car on a jolting
train had been a dangerous business even a handful of years before. More than a few people
had slipped and fallen to their death, and a cinder in the eye or a face full of soot was
only to be expected.

After ham and eggs and rolls and coffee, the world looked a more cheerful place. He was
leaving behind the prairie now, going up toward the mountains. The locomotive labored over
the upgrades and then, as if relieved, sped down the other side of each rise. Watching
trees and boulders flying past was exhilarating, even if Lincoln knew how many accidents
happened on such downgrades.

At last, nearer three hours late than two, the train pulled into Denver. The depot was
small and dilapidated. A broad stretch of empty ground on the other side of the tracks
would, Lincoln had heard, be a fancy new station one day. At the moment, and for the
foreseeable future, it was just empty ground. Wildflowers and weeds splashed it with
color.

"Denver!" the conductor shouted, as he had for every hamlet along the way to
the biggest city in the heart of the West. "All out for Denver!"

Lincoln put his speech in a leather valise, got up, grabbed his bulky carpetbag, and
made his way out of the Pullman car. After a couple of days on the train, solid ground
felt shaky under his feet, as it was said to do for sailors just off their ships. He set
his stovepipe firmly on his head and looked around.

Amid the usual scenes on a railway-station platform--families greeting loved ones with
cries of joy, bankers greeting capitalists with louder (if perhaps less sincere) cries of
joy--Lincoln spotted a couple of rugged fellows who had the look of miners dressed up in
their best, and probably only, suits. Even before they started moving purposefully through
the crowd toward him, he had them pegged for the men he was to meet.

"Mr. McMahan and Mr. Cavanaugh, I presume?" he said, setting down the
carpetbag so he could extend his right hand.

"That's right, Mr. Lincoln," said one of them, who wore a ginger-colored
mustache. "I'm Joe McMahan; you can call Cavanaugh here Fred." His grip was hard
and firm.

"Long as you don't call me late to supper," Cavanaugh said agreeably. He was
a couple of inches taller than McMahan, with a scar on his chin that looked as if it had
come from a knife fight. Both men were altogether unselfconscious about the revolvers on
their right hips. Lincoln had been in the West a good many times, and was used to that.

"Come on, sir," McMahan said. "Here, let me take that." He picked
up the carpetbag. "We'll get you to the hotel, let you freshen up some and get
yourself a tad more shut-eye, too, if that's what you want. These here trains, they're all
very fine, but a body can't hardly sleep on 'em."

"They're better than they used to be," Lincoln said. "I was thinking
that last night, when the porter made up my berth. But you're right--they're not all they
might be."

As they walked out of the station, they passed a beggar, a middle-aged fellow with a
gray-streaked beard who had both legs gone above the knee. Lincoln fumbled in his pockets
till he found a quarter, which he tossed into the tin cup on the floor beside the man.

"I thank you for your kind--" the beggar began in a singsong way. Then his
eyes--eyes that had seen a lot of pain, and, by the rheumy look in them, a lot of whiskey,
too--widened as he recognized his benefactor. He reached into the cup, took out the
quarter, and threw it at Lincoln. It hit him in the chest and fell to the ground with a
clink. "God damn you, you son of a bitch, I don't want any charity from you,"
the legless man snarled. "Wasn't for you, I'd be up and walking, not living out my
days like this."

Fred Cavanaugh took Lincoln by the arm and hurried him along. "Don't take no
notice of Teddy there," he said, the beggar's curses following them. "He gets
some popskull in him, he don't know what the hell he's talkin' about."

"Oh, he knows well enough." Lincoln's mouth was a tight, hard line.
"I've heard that tune before, many times. The men who suffered so much in the War of
Secession blame me for it. They have the right, I think. I blame myself, too, though
that's little enough consolation for them."

Amos, the buggy driver, was cut from the same mold as Cavanaugh and McMahan. The horses
clopped up the street. Mud kicked up from their hooves and the wheels of the buggy. For
all the wealth that had come out of the mines nearby, Denver boasted not a single paved
road. Streams of water ran in the gutters. Trees shaded the residential blocks. Most of
the houses--and the public buildings, too--were of either bright red brick or the local
yellow stone, which gave the town a pleasingly colorful look.

Miners in collarless shirts and blue-dyed dungarees mingled on the streets with
businessmen who would not have been out of place in Chicago or New York. No, after a
moment, Lincoln revised that opinion: some of the businessmen went armed, too.

When he remarked on that, Joe McMahan's mouth twisted in bitterness. "A man has
more'n what he deserves and don't see fit to share it with his pals who ain't got so much,
Mr. Lincoln, he's a fool if he don't reckon they're liable to try and equalize the wealth
whether he likes it or not."

"True enough," Lincoln said. "So true, it may tear our country apart
again one day. Slave labor comes in more forms than that which still persists in the
Confederate States."

Amos shifted a wad of tobacco into his cheek, spat, and said, "Damn straight it
does. That's why we brung you out here--to talk about that."

"I know." Lincoln went back to watching the street scenes. Miner, merchant,
banker--you could tell so much about a man's class and wealth by how he dressed. Women
were sometimes harder to gauge. Who was poor and who was not gave him no trouble. But if a
woman dressed as if she'd come from the pages of Leslie's Illustrated Weekly but painted
her face like a strumpet, was she a strumpet or the wife of some newly rich mining nabob?
In Denver, that was less obvious than it would have been farther east, where cosmetics
were prima facie evidence a woman was fast. The rules were different here, and no wonder,
for a woman could go--and several had gone--straight from strumpet to nabob's wife.

In its ornate pretentiousness, the Htel Metropole matched anything anywhere in
the country. "Here you go, Mr. Lincoln," Fred Cavanaugh said. "You'll be
right comfortable here, get yourself all good and ready for your speech tonight. You'd
best believe a lot of folks want to hear what you've got to say about labor
nowadays."

"Hear me they shall," Lincoln said. "What they do if they hear where I'm
staying, though, may be something else again. Are they not liable to take me for one of
the exploiters over whom they are concerned?"

"Mr. Lincoln, you won't find anybody in Colorado got a thing to say against living
soft," Cavanaugh answered. "What riles folks is grinding other men's noses in
the dirt to let a few live soft."

"I understand the distinction," Lincoln said. "As you remind me, the
essential point is that so many in the United States, like virtually all the whites in the
Confederacy, do not."

The Htel Metropole met every reasonable standard for soft living, and most of the
unreasonable ones as well. After a hot bath in a galvanized tub at the end of the hall,
after a couple of fried pork chops for lunch, Lincoln would have been happy enough to
stretch out on the bed for a couple of hours, even if he would have had to sleep
diagonally to keep from kicking the footboard. But the speech came first.

He was still polishing it, having altogether forgotten about supper, when Joe McMahan
knocked on the door. "Come on, Mr. Lincoln," he said. "We've got ourselves
a full house for you tonight."

The hall was not so elegant as the opera house near the Htel Metro- pole. It was,
in fact, a dance hall with a podium hastily plunked by one wall. But, as McMahan had said,
it was packed. From long practice guessing crowds, Lincoln figured more than a thousand
men--miners and refinery workers, most of them, and farmers, with here and there a
shopkeeper to leaven the mix--stood shoulder-to-shoulder, elbow-to-elbow, to hear what he
had to say.

They cheered loud and long when McMahan introduced him. Most of them were young. Young
men thought of him as labor's friend in a land where capital was king. Older men, like the
beggar in the railway depot, still damned him for fighting, and most of all for losing,
the War of Secession. I'd have been a hero if I won, he thought. And I'd have been a
housewife, or more likely a homely old maid, if I'd been born a woman. So what?

He put on his spectacles and glanced down at the notes he'd written on the train and in
the hotel. "A generation ago," he began, "I said a house divided against
itself, half slave and half free, could not stand. And it did not stand, though its
breaking was not in the manner I should have desired." He never made any bones about
the past. It was there. Everyone knew it.

"The Confederate States continue all slave to this day," he said. "How
the financiers in London and Paris smile on their plantations, their railroads, their
ironworks! How capital floods into their land! And how much of it, my friends, how much
drips down from the eaves of the rich men's man- sions to water the shacks where the
Negroes live, scarcely better off than the brute beasts beside which they labor in the
fields? You know the answer as well as I."

"To hell with the damn niggers," somebody called from the audience.
"Talk about the white man!" Cries of agreement rose.

Lincoln held up a hand. "I am talking about the white man," he said.
"You cannot part nor separate the two, not in the Southern Confederacy. For if the
white laborer there dare go to his boss and speak the truth, which is that he has not got
enough to live on, the boss will tell him, 'Live on it and like it, or I'll put a Negro in
your place and you can learn to live on nothing.'

"And what of our United States, which were, if nothing else, left all free when
the Rebels departed from the Union?" Lincoln went on. "Are we--are you--all free
now? Do we--do you--enjoy the great and glorious blessings of liberty the Founding Fathers
fondly imagined would be the birthright of every citizen of our Republic?

"Or are we returning to the unhappy condition in which we found ourselves in the
years before the War of Secession? Do not our capitalists in New York, in Chicago, yes,
and in Denver, look longingly at their Confederate brethren in Richmond, in Atlanta, in
new and brawling Birmingham, and wish they could do as do those brethren?

"Are we not once more becoming a nation half slave, half free, my friends? Does
not the capitalist eat bread gained by the sweat of your brows, as the slavemaster does by
virtue--and there's a word turned on its ear!--of the labor of his Negroes?" Lincoln
had to stop then, for the shouts that rose up were fierce and angry.

"You know your state, your condition," he continued when he could. "You
know I tell you nothing but the truth. Time was in this country when a man would be hired
labor one year, his own man the next, and hiring laborers to work for him the year after
that. Such days, I fear, are over and done. On the railroads, in the mines, in the
factories, one man's a magnate, and the rest toil for him. If you go to your boss and tell
him you have not got enough to live on, the boss will tell you, 'Live on it and like it,
or I'll put a Chinaman or an Italian or a Jew in your place and you can learn to live on
nothing.'"

A low murmur came from his audience, more frightening in its way than the fury they had
shown before. Fury didn't last. Now Lincoln was making them think. Thought was slower than
anger to flower into action, but it was a hardy perennial. It did not bloom and die.

"What do we do about it, Abe?" shouted a miner still grimy from his long day
of labor far below ground.

"What do we do?" Lincoln repeated. "The Democrats had their day, and a
long day it was, from my time up until President Blaine's inauguration last month. Did
they do a thing, a single solitary thing, to help the lot of the working man?" He
smiled at the cries of No! before going on, "And Blaine, too, though the good Lord
knows I wish him well, has railroad money in his pockets. How much labor can hope for from
him, I do not know.

"But I know this, my friends: when the United States were a house divided before,
they were divided, and did divide, along lines of geography. No such choice avails us now.
The capitalists cannot secede as the slavemasters did. If we are not satisfied with our
government and the way it treats its citizens, we have the revolutionary right and duty to
overthrow it and substitute one that suits us better, as our forefathers did in the days
of George III."

That brought a storm of applause. Men stomped on the floor, so that it shook under
Lincoln's feet. Someone fired a pistol in the air, deafeningly loud in the closed hall.
Lincoln held up both hands. Slowly, slowly, quiet crawled back. Into it, he said, "I
do not advocate revolution. I pray it shall not be necessary. But if the old order will
not yield to justice, it shall be swept aside. I do not threaten, any more than a man who
says he sees a tornado coming. Folks can take shelter from it, or they can run out and
play in it. That is up to them. You, friends, you are a tornado. What happens next is up
to the capitalists." He stepped away from the podium.

"For which I thank you," Lincoln said, raising his voice to be heard through
the storm of noise that went on and on.

"Ask you something, Mr. Lincoln?" McMahan said. Lincoln nodded. McMahan
leaned closer, so only the former president would hear. "You ever come across the
writings of a fellow named Marx, Mr. Lincoln? Karl Marx?"

"The devil I am," Samuel Clemens replied, though his friend's comment did
return his attention to the cramped office of the San Francisco Morning Call. "I was
trying to come up with something for tomorrow's editorial, and I'm dry as the desert
between the Great Salt Lake and Virginia City. I hate writing editorials, do you know
that?"

"You have mentioned it a time or two." Now Herndon's voice was sly. That
suited the reporter's face: he looked as if he had a fox for his maternal grandmother. His
features were sharp and clever, his green eyes studied everything and respected nothing,
and his rusty hair only added to the impression. Grinning, he sank his barb: "Or a
hundred times or two."

"Still true," Clemens snapped, running a hand through his own unruly mop of
red-brown hair. "Do you have any notion of the strain on a man's constitution, having
to come up with so many column inches every day on demand?--and always something new,
regardless of whether there's anything new to write about. If I had my Tennessee
lands--"

"You're a scoffer, that's what you are--nothing but a scoffer," Clemens said,
half amused but still half annoyed, too. "Forty thousand acres of fine land, with God
only knows how much timber and coal and iron, and maybe gold and silver, too, and all of
it in my family."

"It's in another country these days," Clay Herndon reminded him. "The
Confederate States have been a going concern for a long time now."

"Yes, a long time ago, and in another country--and besides, the wench is
dead," Clemens said, scratching his mustache.

Herndon gave him a quizzical look. However clever the reporter was, he wouldn't have
known Marlowe from a marlinspike. "The way you do go on," he said. "Let's
us go on over to Martin's and get some dinner."

"Now you're talking." Clemens rose from his chair with enthusiasm and stuck
his hat on his head. "Any excuse not to work is good enough for me. Weren't for
this"--he patted the battered copy of the American Cyclopedia on his desk with a
touch as tender as a lover's for his beloved--"I don't know how I'd ever manage to
come out for something or against something every day of the year. As if any man needs so
blamed many opinions, or has any business holding them! Wasting my sweetness on the
morning air, that's what I'm doing."

Herndon pulled out his pocket watch. "As of right now, you're wasting your
sweetness on the afternoon air, and you have been for the past ten minutes. Now let's get
moving, before we can't find a place to sit down at Martin's."

Clemens followed his friend out onto the street. It was an April midday in San
Francisco: not too warm, not too cold, the sun shining down from a clear but hazy sky. It
might as easily have been August or November or February. To Clemens, who had grown up
with real seasons, always seeming not far from spring remained strange after almost twenty
years.

When he remarked on that, Herndon snorted. "You don't like it, go down to Fresno.
It's always July there, and a desert July at that."

With a lamb chop, fried potatoes, and a shot of whiskey in front of Sam Clemens, life
improved. He knocked back the shot and ordered another. When it came, he knocked it back,
too, with the sour toast, "Here's to hard work every day."

Clay Herndon snorted again. "I've heard that one almost as often as the Tennessee
lands, Sam. What the devil would you be doing if you weren't running the Morning
Call?"

"Damned if I know," Clemens answered. "Writing stories, maybe, and
broke. But who has time? When the big panic of '63 hit after we lost the war and hung on
and on and on, the whole world turned upside down. I was damn lucky to have any sort of
position, and I knew it. So I hung on like a limpet on a harbor rock. If I ever get ahead
of the game--" He laughed. "About as likely as the Mormons giving up their extra
wives, I expect."

Herndon had a couple of shots of whiskey in him, too. "Suppose you weren't a
newspaperman? What would you do then?"

"I've tried mining--I was almost rich once, which is every bit as fine as almost
being in love--and I was a Mississippi River pilot. If I wanted to take that up again, I'd
have to take Confederate citizenship with it."

"Why not?" Herndon said. "Then you could have yourself another go at
those Tennessee lands."

"No, thank you." Briefly, Clemens had served in a Confederate regiment
operating--or rather, bungling--in Missouri, which remained one of the United States, not
least because most Confederate troops there had been similarly inept. He didn't admit to
that; few in the USA who had ever had anything to do with the other side admitted it these
days. After a moment, he went on. "Their record isn't what you'd call good--more like
what you'd call a skunk at a picnic."

Herndon laughed. "You do come up with 'em, Sam. Got to hand it to you. Maybe you
ought to try writing yourself a book after all. People would buy it, I expect."

"Maybe," Clemens said, which meant no. "Don't see a lot of authors
living off the fat of the land, do you? Besides, it may have taken me a while to cipher
out what steady work was about, but I've got it down solid now. I lived on promises when I
was a miner. I was a boy then, pretty much. I'm not a boy any more."

"All right, all right." Herndon held up a placatory hand. He looked at his
plate, as if astonished the beefsteak he'd ordered had disappeared. His shot glass was
empty, too. "You want one more for the road?"

"Not if I intend to get any work done this afternoon. You want to listen to me
snore at my desk, that's another matter." Clemens got to his feet. He set a quarter
and a small, shiny gold dollar on the table. Herndon laid down a dollar and a half. They
left Martin's--a splendid place, for anyone who could afford to eat there--and walked back
to the Morning Call office.

Edgar Leary, one of the junior reporters, waved a flimsy sheet of telegraph paper in
their faces when they got in. He was almost hopping with excitement. "Look at this!
Look at this!" He had crumbs in his sparse black beard; he brought his dinner to the
Morning Call in a sack. "Didn't come in five minutes ago, or I'm a Chinaman."

"If you'll stop fanning me with it, I will have a look," Clemens said. When
Leary still waved the wire around, Sam snatched it out of his hand. "Give me that,
dammit." He turned it right side up and read it. The more he read, the higher his
bushy eyebrows climbed. Once he'd finished, he passed it to Clay Herndon, saying,
"Looks like I've got something for the editorial after all."

Herndon quickly skimmed the telegraphic report. His lips shaped a soundless whistle.
"This here is more than something to feed you an edito-rial, Sam. This here could be
trouble."

"Don't I know it," Clemens said. "But I can't do the first thing about
the trouble, and I can do something about the editorial. So I'll do that, and I'll let the
rest of the world get into trouble. You ever notice how it's real good about taking care
of that whether anybody wants it to or not?"

He pulled a cigar from a waistcoat pocket, bit off the end, scraped a match against the
sole of his shoe, lighted the cigar, and tossed the match into a shiny brass cuspidor
stained here and there with errant expectorations. Then he went over to his desk and
pulled out the George F. Cram Atlas of the World. He flipped through it till he found the
page he needed.

His finger traced a line. Herndon and Leary were looking over his shoulder, one to the
right, the other to the left. Herndon whistled again. "This is going to be big
trouble," he said. "Bigger than I thought."

"That's a fact." Clemens slammed the atlas closed with a noise like a rifle
shot. Behind him, Edgar Leary jumped. "Hell of a big mess." He spoke with somber
anticipation. "But I don't have to worry about what I'm going to write this
afternoon, so I'm as happy as Peeping Tom in Honolulu, if half of what they say about the
Sandwich Islands is true."

He inked a pen and began to write.

If the wires are not liars--and of course experience has made us all familiar with
Messrs. Western and Union's solemn vow that only the truth shall be permitted to pass over
their telegraphic lines, and with the vigilance with which they guard them from every
falsehood; of course experience has done such a thing, we say, for under our grand and
glorious Constitution anyone may say what he pleases--if this is so, then it seems that
His Mexican Majesty Maximilian has been persuaded to sell his northwestern provinces of
Chihuahua and Sonora to the Confederate States for the sum of three millions of dollars.

This is remarkable news on several counts, which is how lawyers speak of indictments.
First and foremost, superficially, is the feeling of astonishment arising in the bosoms of
those who are familiar in the least with the aforesaid provinces at learning that anyone,
save possibly Old Scratch in contemplation of expanding the infernal regions due to
present overcrowding, should want to purchase them at any price, let alone for such a
munificent sum.

But, as the fellow said after sitting on a needle, there is more to this than meets the
eye. Consider, friends. Mexico's principal export, aside from the Mexicans whose charm
pervades our Golden State, is, not to put too fine a point on it--that being the needle's
business, after all--debt. She owes money to Britain, she owes money to France, she owes
money to Germany, she owes money to Russia--no mean feat, that--and she is prevented from
owing money to the Kingdom of Poland only by that Kingdom's extinction before she was
born.

Being a weak country in debt to a strong one--or to a slew of strong ones--is in these
enlightened times the quickest recipe known for making gunboats flock like buzzards to
one's shores, as the Turkish khedives will assure Maximilian if only he will ask them.
Time was when the United States held up the Monroe Doctrine to shield the Americas from
European monarchs, bill collectors, and other riffraff, but the Doctrine these days is as
dead as its maker, shot through the heart in the War of Secession.

So the Empire of Mexico needs cash on hand if it is to go on being the Empire of
Mexico, or at least the abridged edition thereof. Thus from Maximilian's point of view the
sale of Chihuahua and Sonora makes a deal of sense, but he is apparently going ahead and
doing it anyhow. The question remaining before the house is why the Confederate States
would want to buy the two provinces, no matter how avidly he might want to sell them.

Owning Texas, the Confederacy would already seem to have in its possession a
sufficiency--indeed, even an oversupply--of hot, worthless land for the next hundred
years. Sonora, though, has one virtue Texas lacks--not that having a virtue Texas lacks is
in itself any great marvel--it touches on the Gulf of California, while Chihuahua connects
it to the rest of the CSA. With these new acquisitions, the Confederate States would
extend, like the USA, from sea to shining sea, and, even more to the point, run a railroad
from the same to the shining same. Is that worth three millions of dollars? Pete
Longstreet seems to think so.

Yet to be seen is how the new administration in Washington will view this transaction.
There can be no doubt that any of the previ-ous governments--if by that the reader will
forgive our stretching a point--would do no more than passively acquiesce to the sale, in
much the same manner as the bull acquiesces to the knife that makes him into a steer.
Richmond, London, Paris, and Ottawa form a formidable stall in which the United States are
held.

But will James G. Blaine, having been elected on a platform that consisted largely of
snorting and pawing the ground, now have to show the world it was nothing but humbug and
hokum? Even if it was humbug and hokum, will he dare admit it, knowing that if he should
confess to weakness, even weakness genuinely and manifestly in existence, he will become a
laughingstock and an object of contempt not only in foreign capitals but in the eyes of
the exasperated millions who sent him to the White House to make America strong and proud
again and will with equal avidity send him home with a tin can tied to his tail if he
bollixes the job?

Our view of the matter is that caution is likelier to be necessary than to be, while
our hope is that, for once, our well-known editorial omniscience is found wanting.

Sighing, Clemens set down the pen and shook his wrist to get the cramp out of it.
"I want to buy me one of those type-writing machines they're starting to sell,"
he said.

"Good idea," Clay Herndon said. "They can't weigh much more than a
hundred pounds. Just the thing to take along to listen to the mayor, or to cover a fire:
that'd be even better."

"They're the coming thing, so you can laugh all you like," Clemens told him.
"Besides, if I had one, the compositors would be able to read the copy I give
'em."

"Now you're talking--that's a whole different business." Herndon got up from
his desk and ambled over to Sam. "I never have any trouble--well, never much--reading
your writing. You were really scratching away there. What did you come up with?"

Wordlessly, Clemens passed him the sheets. Herndon had a lot of political savvy, or
maybe just a keen eye for where the bodies were buried-- assuming those two didn't amount
to the same thing. If he was thinking along the same lines as Clemens ...

He didn't say anything till he was through. Then, with a slow nod, he handed the
editorial back. "That's strong stuff," he said, "but you're spot on. When I
first saw the wire, I thought about the ports on the Pacific, but I didn't worry about the
railroad the Rebs'll need to do anything with the ports they get."

"What about Blaine?" Sam asked.

"I'm with you there, too," Herndon answered. "If he lies down for this,
nobody will take him seriously afterwards. But I'm damned if I know how much he can do to
stop it. What do you think's going to happen, Sam?"

"Me?" Clemens said. "I think there's going to be a war."

General Thomas Jackson left his War Department office in Mechanic's Hall, mounted his
horse, and rode east past Capitol Square toward the president's residence on Shockoe
Hill--some from his generation still thought of it as the Confederate White House, though
younger men tried to forget the CSA had ever been connected to the USA. Richmond brawled
around him. Coaches clattered over cobblestones, Negro footmen in fancy livery standing
stiff as statues at their rear. Teamsters driving wagons filled with grain or iron or
tobacco or cotton cursed the men who drove the coaches for refusing to yield the right of
way. On the sidewalk, lawyers and sawyers and ladies with slaves holding parasols to
shield their delicate complexions from the springtime sun danced an elaborate minuet of
precedence.

A middle-aged fellow who walked with a limp tipped his homburg in Jackson's direction
and called out, "Stonewall!"

Jackson gravely returned the salutation. It rang out again, shortly thereafter. Again,
he touched a hand to the brim of his own hat. Somber pride filled him. Not only his peers
but also the common people remembered and appreciated what he'd done in the War of
Secession. In a world where memory was fleeting and gratitude even more so, that was no
small thing.

An iron fence surrounded the grounds of the presidential mansion. At the gateway,
guards in the fancy new butternut uniforms stiffened to attention. "General Jackson,
sir!" they exclaimed in unison. Their salutes were as identical as if they'd been
manufactured in succession at the same stamping mill.

Conscientiously, Jackson returned the salutes. No doubt the guards were good soldiers,
and would fight bravely if the need ever came. When he measured them against the scrawny
wildcats he'd led during the War of Secession, though, he found them wanting. He was
honest enough to wonder whether the fault lay in them or in himself. He'd turned
fifty-seven earlier in the year, and the past had a way of looking better and the present
worse the older he got.

He rode up to the entrance to the president's home. A couple of slaves hurried forward.
One of them held his horse's head while he dismounted, then tied the animal to a cast-iron
hitching post in front of the building. Jackson tossed him a five-cent piece. The slave
caught the tiny silver coin out of the air with a word of thanks.

Tied close by was the two-horse team of a landau with which he was not familiar. The
driver, a white man, sat in the carriage reading a newspaper and waiting for his master to
emerge. That he was white gave Jackson a clue about who his passenger might be, especially
when coupled with the unfamiliar carriage.

And, sure enough, out of the president's residence came John Hay, looking stylish if a
little funereal in a black sack suit. The new minister from the United States was a
strikingly handsome man of about fifty, his brown hair and beard frosted with gray. His
nod was stiff, tightly controlled. "Good day, General," he said, voice polite
but frosty.

"Your Excellency," Jackson said in much the same tones. As a young man, Hay
had served as Abe Lincoln's secretary. That in itself made him an object of suspicion in
the Confederate States, but it also made him one of the few Republicans with any executive
experience whatever. Jackson hoped the latter was the reason U.S. President Blaine had
appointed him minister to the CSA. If not, the appointment came perilously close to an
insult.

Hay had bushy, expressive eyebrows. They twitched now. He said, "I should not be
surprised, General Jackson, if we were seeing President Longstreet on the same
business."

"Oh? What business is that?" Jackson thought Hay likely right, but had no
intention of showing it. The less the enemy--and anyone in Richmond who did not think the
United States an enemy was a fool--knew, the better.

"You know perfectly well what business," Hay returned, now with a touch of
asperity: "the business of Chihuahua and Sonora."

He was, of course, correct: an enemy he might be, and a Black Republican (synonymous
terms, as far as the Confederacy was concerned), but not a fool. Jackson said, "I
cannot see how a private transaction between the Empire of Mexico and the Confederate
States of America becomes a matter about which the United States need concern
themselves."

"Don't be disingenuous," Hay said sharply. "President Longstreet spent
the last two hours soft-soaping me, and I'm tired of it. If you don't see how adding
several hundred miles to our common border concerns us, sir, then you don't deserve those
wreathed stars on your collar." Giving Jackson no chance to reply, he climbed up into
the landau. The Negro who had helped the Confederate general undid the horses. The driver
set down his paper and flicked the reins. Iron tires clattering, the wagon rolled away.

Jackson did not turn his head to watch it go. Diplomacy was not his concern, not
directly: he dealt only with its failures. Back straight, stride steady, he walked up the
stairs into the presidential mansion.

G. Moxley Sorrel, Longstreet's chief of staff, greeted him just inside the door.
"Good morning, General Jackson," he said, his tone almost as wary as Hay's had
been.

"Good morning." Jackson tried to keep all expression from his own voice.

"The president will see you in a moment." Sorrel put what Jackson reckoned
undue stress on the second word. The chief of staff had served Longstreet since the early
days of the War of Secession, and had served through the time when Longstreet and Jackson,
as corps commanders under Lee, were to some degree rivals as well as comrades. Over the
years, Jackson had seen that Longstreet never forgot a rivalry--and what Longstreet
remembered, Moxley Sorrel remembered, too.

Having little small talk in him, Jackson simply stood silent till Sorrel led him into
President Longstreet's office. "Mr. President," Jackson said then, saluting.

"Sit down, General; sit down, please." James Longstreet waved him into an
overstuffed armchair upholstered in flowered maroon velvet. Despite the soft cushions,
Jackson sat as rigidly erect as if on a stool. Longstreet was used to that, and did not
remark on it. He did ask, "Shall I have a nigger fetch you some coffee?"

"No, thank you, sir." As was his way, Jackson came straight to the point:
"I met Mr. Hay as I was arriving here. If his manner be of any moment, the United
States will take a hard line toward our new Mexican acquisitions."

"I believe you are correct in that," Longstreet answered. He scratched his
chin. His salt-and-pepper beard spilled halfway down his chest. He was a few years older
than Jackson. Though he had put on more flesh than the general-in-chief of the Confederate
States, he also remained strong and vigorous. "The Black Republicans continue to
resent us merely for existing; that we thrive is a burr under their tails. I wish Tilden
had been reelected-- he would have raised no unseemly fuss. But the world is as we find
it, not as we wish it."

"The world is as God wills." Jackson declared what was to him obvious.

"Of course--but understanding His will is our province," Longstreet said.
That could have been contradiction in the guise of agreement, at which the president was
adept. Before Jackson could be sure, Longstreet went on, "And Chihuahua and Sonora
are our provinces, by God, and by God we shall keep them whether the United States approve
or not."

"Very good, Mr. President!" Having no compromise in his own soul, Jackson
admired steadfastness in others.

"I have also sent communications to this effect to our friends in London and
Paris," Longstreet said.

"That was excellently done, I am sure," Jackson said. "Their assistance
was welcome during the War of Secession, and I trust they shall be as eager to see the
United States taken down a peg now as they were then."

"General, their assistance during the war was more than merely necessary,"
Longstreet said heavily. "It was the sine qua non without which the Confederate
States should not be a free and independent republic today."

Jackson frowned. "I don't know about that, Your Excellency. I am of the opinion
that the Army of Northern Virginia had a certain small something to do with that
independence." He paused a moment, a tableau vivant of animated thought. "The
battle of Camp Hill for some reason comes to mind."

Longstreet smiled at Jackson's seldom-shown playfulness. "Camp Hill was necessary,
General, necessary, but, I believe, not sufficient. Without the brave work our soldiers
did, England and France should never have been in position to recognize our independence
and force acceptance of that independence on the Lincoln regime."

"Which is what I said, is it not?" Jackson rumbled.

But the president of the CSA shook his head. "No, not quite. You will remember,
sir, I had rather more to do with the military commissioners of the United States than did
you as we hammered out the terms under which each side should withdraw from the territory
of the other."

"Yes, I remember that," Jackson said. "I never claimed to be any sort of
diplomatist, and General Lee was not one to assign a man to a place in which he did not
fit." Jackson saw that as a small barb aimed at Longstreet, who was so slippery, he
might have ended up a Black Republican had he lived in the United States rather than the
Confederacy. Being slippery, though, Longstreet probably took it as a compliment. Jackson
asked the next question: "What of it, sir?"

"This of it: every last Yankee officer with whom I spoke swore up and down on a
stack of Bibles as tall as he was that Lincoln never would have given up the fight if he'd
only been fighting against us," Longstreet said. "The man was a fanatic--still
is a fanatic, going up and down in the USA like Satan in the book of Job, stirring up
trouble wherever he travels. The only thing that convinced him the United States were
licked--the only thing, General--was the intervention of England and France on our behalf.
Absent that, he aimed to keep on no matter what we did."

"He would have done better had he had generals as convinced of the righteousness
of his cause as he was himself," Jackson remarked. "As well for us he did
not."

"As well for us indeed." Longstreet nodded his big, leonine head. "That,
however, is not the point. The point is that the English and French, by virtue of the
service they rendered us, and by virtue of the services they may render us in the future,
have a strong and definite claim upon our attention."

"Wait." Jackson had not lied when he said he was no diplomat; he needed a
while to fathom matters that were immediately obvious to a man like Longstreet. But, as in
his days of teaching optics, acoustics, and astronomy at the Virginia Military Institute,
unrelenting study let him work out what he did not grasp at once. "You are saying,
Your Excellency, are you not, that we are still beholden to our allies and must take their
wishes into account in formulating our policy?"

"Yes, I am saying that. I wish I weren't, but I am," Longstreet replied.
Jackson started to say something; the president held up a hand to stop him. "Now you
wait, sir, until you have answered this question: does the prospect of taking on the
United States over the Mexican provinces alone and unaided have any great appeal to
you?"

"It could be done," Jackson said at once.

"I do not deny that for an instant, but it is not the question I put to you,"
Longstreet said. "What I asked was, has the prospect any great appeal to you? Would
you sooner we war against the USA by ourselves, or in the company of two leading European
powers?"

"The latter, certainly," Jackson admitted. "The United States have
always outweighed us. We have more men and far more factories now than I ever dreamt we
should, but they continue to outweigh us. If ever they found leaders and morale to match
their resources, they would become a formidable foe."

"This is also my view of the situation." Longstreet drummed his fingers on
the desk in front of him. "And Blaine, like Lincoln, has no sense of moderation when
it comes to our country. If he so chooses, as I think he may, he can whip them up into a
frenzy against us in short order. This concerns me. What also concerns me is the price
London and Paris have put on a renewal of their alliance with us. The necessity for
weighing one of those concerns against the other is the reason I asked to see you here
today."

"A price for continued friendship? What price could the British and French require
for doing what is obviously in their interest anyhow?" By asking the question, he
proved his want of diplomacy to Longstreet and, a moment later, to himself.
"Oh," he said. "They intend to try to lever us into abandoning our peculiar
institution."

"There you have it, sure enough," Longstreet agreed. "Both the British
and French ministers make it abundantly clear that their governments shall not aid us in
any prospective struggle against the United States unless we agree in advance to undertake
emancipation no later than a year after the end of hostilities. They are acting in concert
on this matter, and appear firmly determined to follow their words with deeds, or rather,
with the lack of deeds we should otherwise expect."

"Let them," Jackson growled, as angry as if Britain and France were enemies,
not the best friends the Confederate States had. "Let them. We'll whip the Yankees,
and after that we'll do whatever else needs doing, too."

"I assure you, General, I admire your spirit from the bottom of my heart,"
Longstreet said. "If we are assured of success in a conflict against the USA over
Chihuahua and Sonora, please tell me so, and tell me plainly."

Jackson hesitated--and was lost. "In war, Your Excellency, especially war against
a larger power, nothing is assured, as I said before. I am confident, however, that God,
having given us this land of ours to do with as we will, does not intend to withdraw His
gift from our hands."

"That, I fear, is not enough." Longstreet let out a long sigh. "You have
no conception, General, to what degree slavery has become an albatross round our necks in
all our intercourse, diplomatic and commercial, with foreign powers. The explanations, the
difficulties, the resentments grow worse year by year. We and the Empire of Brazil are the
only remaining slaveholding nations, and even the Brazilians have begun a program of
gradual emancipation for the Negroes they hold in servitude."

"Mr. President, if we are right, what foreigners have to say about us matters not
at all, and I believe we are right," Jackson said stubbornly. "I believe, as I
have always believed, that God Himself ordained our system as the best one practicable for
the relationship between the white and Negro races. Changing it now at foreigners'
insistence would be as much a betrayal as changing it at the Black Republicans' insistence
twenty years ago."

"I understand this perspective, General, and, believe me, I am personally in
sympathy with it," Longstreet said. When a politician, which was what the president
of the CSA had long since become, said he was personally in sympathy with something,
Jackson had learned, he meant the opposite. And, sure enough, Longstreet went on,
"Other considerations, however, compel me to take a broader view of the
question."

"What circumstances could possibly be more important than acting in accordance
with God's will as we understand it?" Jackson demanded.

"Being certain we do understand it," Longstreet answered. "If we fight
the United States alone and are defeated, is it not likely that the victors would seek to
impose emancipation and even, to the degree they can effect it, Negro dominance upon us,
to weaken us as much as possible?"

Jackson grunted. He had never considered the aftermath of a Confederate defeat. Victory
was the only consideration that had ever crossed his mind. Reluctantly, he gave President
Longstreet credit for subtlety.

Longstreet said, "Can we successfully fight the United States without their
coasts' being blockaded, a task far beyond the power of our navy alone? Can we fight them
without pressure from Canada to make them divide their forces and efforts instead of
concentrating solely against us? If you tell me we are as certain, or even nearly as
certain, of success without our friends as with them, defying their wishes makes better
sense."

"I think, as I have said, we can win without them," Jackson said, but he was
too honest not to add, "With them, though, the odds improve."

"My thought exactly," Longstreet said, beaming, jollying him toward
acquiescence. "And if we emancipate the Negro de jure of our own free will, we shall
surely be spared the difficulties that would ensue if, as the result of some misfortune,
we were compelled to emancipate him de facto."

There was some truth--perhaps a lot of truth--in that. Jackson had to recognize it.
Longstreet made him think of a fast-talking hoaxer, selling Florida seaside real estate
under water twenty-two hours out of every twenty-four. But the president had been elected
to make decisions of this sort. "I am a soldier, Your Excellency," Jackson said.
"If this be your decision, I shall of course conduct myself in conformity to
it."